bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Are eight hundred thousand youth worth reporting on?

    As of 3:53 CDT, August 15, the top story in Europe, according to CNN, is a pig-squealing contest in France.

    The Associated Press-Germany is highlighting a picture of a mother hippopotamus and her baby.

    The New York Times Europe Index features a number of stories, including the Greek jet crash, a follow up story on the London bombing, strikes at Heathrow, and others.  These are, of course, important stories.  I looked for the top story out of Germany:  The second-ranking defense official under the Kohl government has been sentenced to jail for corruption.

    The BBC had an article about Pope Benedict yesterday, mentioning  that 800,000 young people from around the world are expected at World Youth Day this week. But today’s news from Europe contains nothing.

    Those young people descended on Germany today.  Where is a mention of it in the major press?

    Amy Welborn has collected links.

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  • Math and Text, a blog worth noting.

    A good sample post from Math and Text, a blog I’ve been reading lately. 

    Its descriptor:  "A look at K-8 Mathematics through the content in textbooks.

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  • Journalistic simplicity: 0. Blogging nuance: 1.

    Amy Welborn answers the question of how perception of the sins of Church leaders impacts faith.  Actually, she answers the two questions that make it up:  how does it impact the beliefs of outsiders regarding Catholicism?  and how does it impact our own?

    [I]f the minority who flagrantly fail are an argument against the truth of what they say, what about those who spectacularly succeed? Wouldn’t they be an argument for it? Is it necessary to privilege the witness of the former over the latter? Not for an honest person, I would think…

    We don’t hear too much about the ones who spectacularly succeed, although we may be lucky enough to meet some of them, even if we do not realize it. 

    A good reason to become knowledgeable about the lives of the saints and the times they live in.  It’s an antidote:  Sometimes the contemporary pickings can seem pretty thin.

    I don’t mean that in past times there were more living saints than there are now, so we have to look to history to find heroes.  What I mean is that, in their times, the pickings were just as thin.  And yet, there they were.

    Another point of Amy’s:

    [An interviewer] asked me how I would talk to my own kids about shortcomings of church employees. I really didn’t know what to say because you know, for most of their lives, I was a church employee, and my shortcomings were blindingly clear to them….

    Forget other people’s failures. What about mine? Do my own failures invalidate what I believe to be true?

    And finally, an eloquent argument for a sense of history:

    …I tend to see things across time, culture and space. If the alleged events really did occur, Monsignor Clark’s sins don’t impact my faith in Christ any more than do the sins of a 14th century bishop or a 19th century abbess. It’s all exactly the same to me.

    How can I co-exist with sinful leaders? Even if every single person in a leadership position in the Church was instantly purified, right now, I would still be co-existing with sinful leaders – 2000 years worth of them.

    Amy also has some advice for people who are going to be "out there railing about morality."  Read the whole thing.

    As an aside:  This is a perfect example of the ability of bloggers—writer, editor, publisher all together, communicating directly with the reader without the intermediaries of professional journalism—to get beneath the surface of a topic, concisely and conversationally. 

    I mean, compare Amy’s short piece to this by Robert Anglen at the Cincinnati Enquirer, from two years ago, which is the first newspaper story I hit on with a Google search.   There’s nothing wrong with the journalist’s piece per se:  it reports on declining church donations and attendance, and interviews a few folks.  It’s a news piece, not an opinion piece.  But it makes no points that are really worthy of a great deal of thought.

    (One point that struck me about that random article:  A drop in donations doesn’t alarm me or seem like a crisis in faith; a drop in attendance would alarm me, since attendance at Sunday Mass is obligatory.   But is there really a drop in attendance?  How do you think the parish tracks attendance?  Typically no one is standing at the door with a clicker, or taking tickets.  Answer:  They do it via the collection envelopes.  So if people stop giving money it may look like a drop in attendance.)

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  • Peter Jennings, journalism, and religon.

    At Get Religion.

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  • Amy Welborn, on answering letters from “Da Vinci Code” fans.

    This  is a good article from a great blogger.  Choice point:

    The picture of the Christian indifferent to history who simply accepts received wisdom is also the fruit of the American believer’s general disinterest in history.

    If people in general were well-educated in history, then perhaps Dan Brown’s "harmless work of fiction"—would indeed be as harmless as it was fictional. 

    Unfortunately, people hungry for history are swallowing it whole, the way that some especially naive folks thought The Blair Witch Project was for real.  (The words "Based on a true story" are very powerful, even when they are plastered on for effect only.  Look what happened with Fargo, maybe—Snopes is noncommittal.)

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  • Better to give than receive—this stuff anyway.

    I wish I could take out an advertisement in every church bulletin in the archdiocese with the following message:

    Dear well-meaning person,

    Please do not donate any clothing that you, yourself, would not want to be seen in. 

    Also refrain from donating broken toys.  Thanks ever so much.

    Sincerely,  Your Favorite Charity

    Today, at the crisis pregnancy center where I volunteer, I sorted through yet another bag of donations that was largely useless.  The contents of the bag were as follows:

    • Two boys’ shirts, size 6, in good condition.  By themselves, a fine donation.
    • One boys’ Minnesota Twins jersey with MIENTKIEWICZ on the back.
    • Two pairs of shoes in good condition.  Four pairs of badly beat-up shoes.
    • Eight items of clothing with obvious holes, missing buttons, and/or stains.
    • Three straps of nylon webbing.  (What were they thinking?  Someone might be able to use this as a belt.)
    • One paper bag from Bath and Body Works.
    • Two torn garbage bags.

    There were also a few items that I assume were intended as toys.  They were:

    • An old-fashioned plastic toy phone, the kind with a handset and a cord connecting to a base that had either buttons or a rotary dial on it.  It’s hard to tell, because this phone consisted only of the handset.
    • A single interlocking block.  Think “lone Lego.”  Except that this one won’t actually connect with Lego brand interlocking blocks.
    • A broken calculator.
    • The plastic tube left over when the lollipop from one of these had already been eaten.

    Honestly, what are people thinking?  That the local clothing shelf is their own personal garbage can?  Even one of the “good” shirts in there—the Mientkiewicz jersey—is a reject in disguise, since Mientkiewicz was traded to Boston in 2004.

    A little respect for the people who use these services, please.  If you’re too good to wear that shirt, then so are they.

    We kept the good-condition shoes and the shirts (even the Mientkiewicz one) and the rest went straight into the garbage.

    And another thing:  If you’re going to donate clothing, please wash it first.  Especially if it reeks of cat pee or cigarette smoke.  Here’s a dirty little secret:  If it needs to be washed, it’ll probably get thrown away.  The crisis pregnancy center does not have a washer and dryer.  And—call us prudes—but we are reluctant to offer women dirty clothes to dress their babies in.

    And another thing.  Donations of maternity clothes are great.  But XXXL clothing does not make good maternity clothes, except for XXXL women, and then only when the clothing is, in fact, maternity clothing.  I can’t count how many donations of size-26-or-larger not-maternity women’s clothes keep coming in.  The only explanation is that the donors think that this stuff is good for pregnant women.  I’ve been pregnant twice.   It’s not.  If you have extended size clothing to donate, please only send the maternity clothes to the maternity-clothes exchange.

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  • Short Communication: “On Toast.”

    It is unquestionably evident that the peanut butter toast must be bisected twice along the diagonal. 

    This produces four (4) isosceles right triangles, in the case of square toast.  (Applying this method to rectangular toast produces two obtuse and two acute triangles, which does not affect the following analysis.)  Experiments indicate that the triangles are, predominantly, eaten beginning with the vertex opposite the two equal angles.  Current theory holds that the driving force for this behavior is the phenomenon of crust rejection, which is not universal among toddlers but is nevertheless common enough to warrant its consideration as a general case.  Then crust acceptors can be regarded as a special case of the generic toddler, which will be treated at the end of this report.

    By the time the crust (which I define self-consistently as that part of the peanut butter toast that is inedible to a crust rejector) is reached, and laid down on the plate, its configuration is approximately linear. 

    Since the toddler’s face is a convex curve (which can be approximated as a paraboloid for the purposes of contact mechanics, viz. the theory of Hertz), it is tangent to the idealized crust at a single point.  Compression of the curve against the crust (as if to obtain the last bit of jelly) can expand this point into an ellipse, of course, but any such ellipse is finite and limited, as the force of compression increases with the 3/2 power of the contact area.  (The value of 3/2 assumes elastic contact, which is, of course, preposterous, but can be excused on the basis of the fact that my textbook on non-Hertzian contact mechanics has gone missing.)

    The competing technique that has the most support is to bisect the toast twice, parallel to the sides.  But this practice, though well-grounded in theory (chiefly because it produces four congruent quadrilaterals that may be conveniently stacked, regardless of the aspect ratio of the original toast, and thus appeals to the toddler who likes making little sandwiches), fails miserably in the laboratory setting. 

    For the toast is highly likely to be consumed along the path of least resistance, which clearly begins at the only crust-free vertex of each quadrilateral and proceeds across the toast until the crust is reached.  But the crust of such a quadrilateral extends along two adjacent sides of the quadrilateral, subtending a right angle.  Whereas the linear crust produced using the double-diagonal-bisection method is tangent to the toddler face in the absence of compression force, the crust produced in the double-parallel-bisection method conforms to the toddler face even in the case of  very small compression force, and even in the most idealized situation is guaranteed to make contact in at least two separate locations.  At each of these two locations the situation is comparable to that of the single contact in the double-diagonal-bisection method.

    Therefore, the double-parallel-bisection method can be expected to result in toast-face contact over approximately twice the surface area that would result from the double-diagonal-bisection method.  Accordingly, twice the amount of peanut butter will be transferred from the toast to the face. 

    The author of this report, therefore, recommends that the double-diagonal-bisection method be employed for all crust-rejecting children.  Crust acceptors are exempt from this recommendation.

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  • The Guadalupe Event

    Today I was looking for some information about the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, December 12, which also happens to be my wedding anniversary.  I happened upon an interesting website on the subject.  The author carefully considers all of the information available about the famous, miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, including some reported chemical analysis of the pigments and digital analysis of close-ups of the eyes, and (rejecting the "theological explanation" as irrational)  concludes:

    The creation of the Guadalupe image was not due to the effects of the immediate and miraculous influence of the Virgin Mary or God.

    Since the image nevertheless exists, and since there are the specific features mentioned above, nothing more remains than the possibility that we—contrary to the declarations made by theology—are dealing with a very rational and explainable event, even if every detail has yet to be explained.

    In other words, the projection of the Virgin Mary image by strange, and most likely extraterrestrial technologically advanced intelligences.

    That’s right:  It was aliens!

    Even if one does not believe in the Guadalupe apparition—and to my knowledge, Catholics are not required to believe in it or in any other private apparition—this is fun to read.  Most people inclined to be skeptical about Marian apparitions would simply assume that the story was invented and the image a carefully crafted fake.  This author, on the other hand, accepts unquestioningly the traditional (and fascinating) story of Juan Diego, the reported apparition, and the genuineness of the miraculous image; he just thinks it was caused by ETIs, which are, I suppose, the new UFOs.

    The logic he uses to prove that God didn’t do it is good too, guaranteed to amuse both believers and skeptics.

    Guadalupe image

    On the name "Guadalupe"

    On analysis of the image

    Google cache of a page listing pictographic elements of the image

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  • Potholders!

    That’s the Experimental School Subject this week for the boy who turned five yesterday. 

    Our core subjects are Religion, Math, and Reading, but I’ve been trying out some different stuff to add to the curriculum.  I figure I’ve got time for one "extra" subject one day a week.  What we’re trying now, I suppose, is "hand work"—some sort of useful or lovely thing made with the hands.

    The boy has never been all that interested in art qua art.  He likes to paint, he likes to draw; I have a few paintings he did hung around the house; but it doesn’t really capture his attention.  I wondered if he might like better something that took time to make, something that didn’t have to be finished by suppertime, something he could work on a little bit, put away for a while, and get back out again later. 

    So I picked this potholder kit up at Borders last week and presented it to him in the evening after the nearly-2-year-old had gone to sleep.  He was fascinated and we worked on it for more than an hour.  After that he added one or two loops at a time, a little bit every day.  Last night, again after the nearly-2-year-old fell asleep, he put on the last loop.

    I showed him how to finish the edge, which is tricky and really must be done all in one go lest the whole thing fall apart.  I was impressed by how much concentration he brought to the task.  He did it mostly himself.  I stood by to listen for wails of "Oh no!" and to rescue his work when a loose loop threatened to unweave the whole thing.  But we finished a lovely, confetti-colored potholder that he is going to send to his Grandma today in the mail.

    Midway through the project I bought a second kit for myself.  🙂  Well, it’s kind of fun!

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  • Who was that Melchizidek guy again?

    Mark and I are in a couples’ study group associated with our former parish.  We are reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in chunks rather than in a progression through the book; so, for example, we just finished a study of the seven sacraments.

    Holy Orders was tough for us to understand, in part because the theology of it seems to depend so much on a seemingly obscure figure from the Old Testament:  Melchizidek.  We couldn’t figure out why he was supposed to be an especially important type of Christ.  The problem gnawed at me a little, and after some reading I understand it a little better.

    The explication appears in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Hebrews.   Here is my summary:

    • The nature of a “high priest” is to be called by God from among men.
    • Christ is the “priest forever according to the order of Melchizidek” who is addressed in Psalm 110.
    • God promised to Abraham, swearing “by himself,” that he would be blessed and multiplied, and God delivered.
    • Jesus has entered on our behalf “behind the veil” of heaven, analogous to the veil which in the Temple shielded the Holy of Holies, as a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizidek.
    • Genesis 14 shows that Melchizidek, king of Salem and priest of God most high, met Abraham as he returned from his defeat of the kings and blessed him.
    • Genesis 14 shows that Abraham tithed to Melchizidek.
    • Melchizidek’s name means “king of righteousness.”
    • Melchizidek was king of Salem, which means “peace,” so he was also “king of peace.”
    • Genesis 14 doesn’t mention his ancestry, birth, or death, which makes him a timeless and eternal figure, “to resemble the Son of God,” “a priest forever.”
    • The levitical priests, the descendants of Levi, who are descendants of Abraham, receive tithes from the rest of Israel, not because they are greater—they are brothers with the rest—but because they are commanded to by the Law.
    • But Melchizidek was not of Abraham’s ancestry and received tithes and blessed Abraham.
    • In the case of the levitical priesthood, mortal men receive tithes; in the case of Melchizidek, a “priest forever” does.
    • “One might even say” that Levi himself was tithed (to God via Melchizidek) by Abraham, “for he was still in his father’s loins when Melchizidek met him.”
    • Perfection could not come from the levitical priesthood, “according to the order of Aaron;”  so another priest had to arise “according to the order of Melchizidek.”
    • This change of priesthood accompanied the change in the law.
    • Jesus was of the tribe of Judah, which previously had nothing to do with priesthood.
    • Melchizidek became priest not by a law of physical heredity, but “by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed,” i.e., “forever.”
    • The Levitical priests after the order of Aaron did not exchange a covenant with God; they became priests according to the law of their inheritance.  But Psalm 110 says “the Lord has sworn”—that Melchizidek became a priest in a covenant with God.
    • The new priesthood is a priesthood of perfect sonship rather than of weakness of man relative to God.

    So to sum even further, the priesthood according to the order of Aaron has these characteristics:

    1. begins at birth as an inheritance according to the specifications of the Law
    2. dies when the priest dies
    3. is limited not just to Israel, but to the tribe of Levi within Israel.

    But the priesthood according to the order of Melchizidek has these:

    1. begins as a covenant between God who calls and the hearer who responds
    2. does not die; is permanent
    3. extends not just to other tribes, like Judah, but indeed to all the nations.

    The simple fact that Melchizidek’s priesthood is “forever” in Psalm 110 seems to be the defining characteristic of it:  it is a priesthood that is indelible, and therefore sustained by God.  The form of priesthood that was previously known, the levitical priesthood, is mortal; it dies with the priest.  A priesthood that is “forever” must be by definition different.  The other obvious difference is that it does not arise from heredity; it is not conferred by a natural inheritance, not mediated by a specification in the Law (which had a beginning and, we see, an end).  Instead it arises from something that came before the Law:  the direct call of God and the response of the one called, forming a mutual promise, a covenant.

    Covenants precede law; covenants also transcend it, so they survive even when the law passes away.

    The point of all this, or at least how it relates to the sacrament of Holy Orders, is that our institutional priesthood is a priesthood that is instituted by Christ after his own pattern, “after the order of Melchizidek,” and not a type of Aaron.  Because the idea of a hereditary priesthood is so foreign to common practice, indeed to modernity itself, it seems obvious to us that priests should get their priesthood not from heredity, but by making a personal commitment in response to a vocation.  It was less obvious to people living in the first-century Holy Land, especially to people who were familiar with Israel’s practice.  Hence the sharp distinction between Melchizidek and Aaron.

    One more thing about this that I thought was pretty sly.  A large number of the more insipid modern hymns have a habit of referring to Jesus mainly as an instrument of “peace” and “justice.”  It’s a leftover scrap of wishful thinking that fell off the side of authentic liberation theology, maybe, a scrap that thinks the whole point of Christianity is to achieve the ends of earthly justice and earthly peace.

    “nothing more than he can save us, who was justice for the poor, who was rage against the night, who was hope for peaceful people, who was light…”  (some hymn by Tom Conry)

    “…when the son of peace and justice fills the earth with radiant light…” (some other hymn by somebody else)

    Anyway, I think from now on when I hear such things I will be quietly pleased that to declare Jesus Christ the “king of peace and justice” in those or similar words is, essentially, to identify Him with Melchizidek, the king of Salem, the king of righteousness (aka justice), a sort of hidden proclamation in the reality of the priestly vocation.  Just a private pleasure, but it’ll be there nonetheless.

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  • Check out Dooce’s Month 18 newsletter.

    This is especially sweet.  Read all the way to the end.

    It’s a nice tradition she has going there, don’t you think?

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  • Doubt: A virtue?

    Pontifications led me to Disputations, on doubt.  It’s short and good, so I’m going to do what Ponty did and reproduce it all here.

    Whether doubt is a virtue

    Objection 1. It would seem that doubt is a virtue. For I have doubts, and I am virtuous. Therefore, doubt is a virtue.

    Objection 2. Further, people who don’t have doubts are obnoxious. But being obnoxious is contrary to the virtue of charity. Therefore, doubt is a virtue.

    Objection 3. Further, by doubting a man comes to accept and understand his faith more deeply. Since the fruits of doubt are good, doubt itself must be a virtue.

    On the contrary, the Apostle writes, “For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, which is moved and carried about by the wind. Therefore let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.” [Jas. 1:6-7] Therefore doubt is not a virtue.

    I answer that, doubt is contrary to faith, and whatever is contrary to a virtue cannot itself be a virtue.

    But not all forms of doubt are so opposed to faith as to be vices. A man may doubt out of ignorance, as being unsure of something because he does not know that someone trustworthy has affirmed it, and this in itself is not sinful, if he cannot be blamed for his ignorance. Or a man may doubt out of a lack of clarity, as being unsure of the meaning of what a trustworthy person has affirmed, or out of an error in reasoning, as when he fails to see that a particular consequence necessarily follows from what he believes; in neither case is his doubt a sin in itself.

    If, however, a man doubts through deliberately turning his will away from attending to the intellectual principle by which an object of faith is to be accepted, this may be accounted blindness of mind and a sin, as the Doctor writes. Further, a man may doubt through obstinately refusing to assent to that which is proposed as an article of faith, which is an act of unbelief and a sin.

    Reply to Objection 1. Yeah, and so’s my big toe.

    Reply to Objection 2. Trust me, they’d be obnoxious even if they doubted.

    Reply to Objection 3. The withholding of assent that is the act of doubt can be done in two ways. First, as an exercise of the intellect, whereby the content of faith is examined by asking such questions as, “What if it were not so?” This exercise is done with the purpose of deepening faith, and is not doubt properly so-called.

    The second way, which is doubt proper, is to withhold assent unconditionally. This act terminates in a state in which the actor has less faith than before, and can in no way be held to cause an increase in faith. It may be that, subsequently, the man will grow in faith, but such growth requires other causes and cannot be regarded as the end for which the man doubts. If the man winds up with a greater faith than before he doubted, this is to be regarded as God bringing good out of evil, not of a virtuous means producing good fruit.

    What I especially like about this is the bit about "because he does not know that someone trustworthy has affirmed it" and being "unsure of the meaning of what a trustworthy person has affirmed."  Most discourse on doubt and belief never acknowledge that, in fact, most of what we think we "know" comes to us through other people.  We depend for nearly all our knowledge on the trustworthiness of others. 

    (The more modern we become, the truer this is.  The camera has always lied; but it’s much easier with Photoshop.)

    Almost everything that an individual can know—history, science, geography—he takes on faith.  Faith in the people who have taught us is a much more fundamental part of the human intellect than it usually gets credit for.  Without it we can’t move beyond what we see with our own eyes or follow with our own reasoning from philosophical postulates.

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